Translating women's silence: A pragmatic analysis of Warsan Shire's For Women Who Are Difficult to Love poem
Keywords:
pragmatic translation, translation shifts, Mona Baker, Warsan ShireAbstract
Poetic translation often involves preserving not only linguistic meaning but also the implicit emotional and cultural nuances embedded in the source text. This study investigates how pragmatic meaning constructs emotional silence and feminine identity in Warsan Shire's poem For Women Who Are Difficult to Love and how these meanings shift in an Indonesian translation prepared by the researcher for analytical purposes. Employing a qualitative descriptive design, the study applies Baker's (2018) framework of pragmatic meaning, focusing on implicature, presupposition, and contextual cues. The data comprise the complete poem retrieved from Shire's official website and its line-by-line Indonesian translation. From 35 lines of the source text, 22 instances of pragmatic meaning were identified, consisting of 11 implicatures, 6 presuppositions, and 5 contextual cues. The analysis reveals that the original poem constructs silence through indirect emotional cues and metaphorical restraint, whereas the Indonesian translation introduces several pragmatic shifts: some implicatures become explicit, certain presuppositions are intensified, and several metaphors assume more concrete forms. These shifts subtly reshape the speaker's identity, making her appear more emotionally exposed and self-aware in the target text. The findings demonstrate that translating poetic silence requires negotiating not only linguistic meaning but also emotional nuance and cultural resonance, thereby contributing to research on pragmatic translation and literary discourse.
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